[I wrote this last year for Tracy Lynn's 12 Guest Posts of Christmas. I really like it. And I stand by every word.]

#426 Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Friends, I don't mean to alarm you, but there is danger all around us, lurking in the most innocent-seeming circumstances. The media bombards us with it daily, and it is up to us to be ever vigilant if we have any hope of stopping the menace.

Today's threat to our Values?

Christmas carols.

They’re fun, festive, all about love, peace and joy, and sung with gusto by young and old alike every December, one of the layers of the holidays everyone seems to enjoy. (Well, not the ACLU, but that’s another story.)

However, it is in exactly these situations that we must be on our guard, for who would suspect malicious coded messages in something as innocent as a carol?

Yes.

Previously I've exposed the infiltration of Bolsheviks in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," which not only sly endorses Communism, but has the temerity to suggest that Football is a Reindeer Game, when anyone knows that if football is played by any animals, it is played by clydesdale horses.

And who can forget my award-nominated examination into how the United Nations tried to destroy America by removing it from the Gold Standard through that most anti-captilistic of carols, "Silver Bells" ?

But today friends, today we turn an even darker corner. Today we look at a carol perniciously malignant, aimed at our very future itself: our children. Look closer, friends, and see what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

In this case, a fat avuncular trespasser, a one man moral majority who makes the Patriot Act look like purring kitten. Through sophisticated scholarly analysis I will prove to you that "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" poses the gravest threat yet to our continued existance.

The evidence:

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWNOh, you better not shout, you better not cryYou better not pout, I’m telling you why….Santa Claus is coming to town

He’s making a list, and checking it twiceGonna find out who’s naughty and niceSanta Claus is coming to Town

He sees you when you’re sleepingHe knows when you’re awakeHe knows if you’ve been bad or goodSo be good for goodness’ sake!

Oh, you better not shout, you better not cryYou better not pout, I’m telling you why….Santa Claus is coming to town

Take a look at those lyrics, friends! The Terrorist Surveillance Program (or Domestic Spy Program, depending on which side of the donkey you like to lick) has nothing on this dude. But before we even get to the spygames there is the troubling first verse. Let’s look at it in detail together:

Oh, you better not shout, you better not cryYou better not pout, I’m telling you why….Santa Claus is coming to town

Right from the beginning we are threatening children, trying to force our repressed anglo-saxon codes of conduct on them. Hear the menace in the first line? You better not shout, you better not cry, you better not pout….

There’s a big stick behind that threat, and what is that stick? The arrival of one Santa Claus. Who is this figure, what kind of unholy influence does he wield that he can dictate behavior just with the rumor of his appearance in town?

Even more disturbing are the socio-economic implications, but we’ll get back to that later. Let’s move to the second verse:

He’s making a list, and checking it twiceGonna find out who’s naughty and niceSanta Claus is coming to Town

Here we find that Santa is “making a list.” Sounds disturbingly like Nazi Germany, or at the very least neo-McCarthyism, holiday-style.

Not only is Santa making this so-called list, but he’s checking it twice. What does this tell us? Why, that Santa has OCD, of course.

Moving on to the dagger of the piece, we see that Santa is Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice. The term “gonna find out” has an inevitability to it. What the song is saying is that no matter what you do, Santa is going to find out. In other words, “You can’t fight Big Brother, so don’t try.”

Secondly, there’s the whole “naughty” vs. “nice” angle. Taken with the first verse, we now see a clear pattern emerging: “Think as we think, act as we say, or no presents for you on Christmas day.” As we will soon see, this kind of thinking leads us off a cliff, but first: the third verse:

He sees you when you’re sleepingHe knows when you’re awakeHe knows if you’ve been bad or goodSo be good for goodness’ sake!

Think about this for a moment: Presumably Santa, moral arbiter for all behavior, has no need to watch you while you sleep. I mean, what possible misdeeds are you committing while deep in slumber? (Unless we’re now being judged on our dreams, a truly frightening prospect.)

No, it’s clear to me that watching people while they sleep serves no purpose. Well, no legitmate purpose.

People, I’m not trying to throw a wet blanket on your holiday fun, but I think it’s abundantly clear what's going on. Suddenly that “bowl full of jelly” is not so jolly, is it?

I know you feel ill, but we must press on and finish this verse:

He knows if you’ve been bad or goodSo be good for goodness’ sake!

At this point we’re basically assigning Santa god-like powers. I mean, depending on how Calvanistic your leanings are, what’s the point of even trying to behave if Santa knows what you’re up to before you get there?

However, there is hope, of a sort, as we are cautioned to “be good for goodness’ sake.” But even here we encounter at the very least a paradox, and possibly massive hypocrisy in action.

Here we have the whole song imploring us to be good, to think good, to act good, even while unconscious, all with the unnamed threat of “no presents.” Now at the very end we’re told that our right behavior should take place for no other reason than its own sake. How disengenuous can you get? They want us to believe that after threats, intimidation, and scare tactics that enter realms thus far prohibited by Geneva Conventions (unless you’re going to claim that pajamas aren’t an Army “uniform”), the song suddenly does a 180 and implores to behave than for no other reason than the sake of all that is good. It’s a little late to throw Nicomachean Ethics on us, Santa lovers!

The last verse repeats the first, which gives me an opportunity to talk about the carol's overall implications. Fairly explicitly throughout we’re told of Santa’s impending visit, and the need to therefore behave. Never actually mentioned (and perhaps all the more effective because of it), is the reason why we should live our lives in manner pleasing to Arctic Perverts: presents.

Since most Christmas rants deal at least tengentially on the crass consumerism (and it’s underlying cause: self-absorbed hedonism) of Christmas, we will skip over that for now and return to the sociological quandries this song brings up.

I think that any clear-text reading of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” lends an interpretation that good behavior is necessary to rake in those presents. Or, to look at the matter conversely, morally “bad” behavior will have the effect of bringing no presents to the child in question.

Yet look at this world we live in. For whatever reason, poorer disadvantaged kids do not get nearly the presents that well-off children receive.

Are you (or Santa, or anyone, for that matter) going to sit there with a straight face and tell me that poor kids (which just so happens to include a much larger percentage of African-American and Latino children, you raging bigot) are simply “bad,” while their richer (ahem, whiter) counterparts are “good”???

Have you the gall?

No, friends, as much of a stretch it might be, I think that powerful logical analysis must eventually afford the conclusion that the number and quality of a child’s presents is directly proportional to the economic status of those providing for that child. (Or in some cases, proportional to the access those providers have to credit cards.)I have taken the liberty of constucting a pictoral representation of what we are talking about (removing the higher-level math that might scare off those of you educated in the public school system).

where W is WealthP is parents (or Providers)Q1 is Quantity of PresentsQ2 is Quality of Presents

Having sufficiently proven that it is Socioeconomic status which accounts the most for Presents (a position that anyone who has ever spent any time around a spoiled rich kid can attest to), and that the moral behavior argument doesn’t hold up, and adding to that the empirically true observation that disadvantaged children have a higher percentage of non-whites among them, we are led inescapably to the conclusion that “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” is undeniably racist, and seeks to make us so as well.

Fight that temptation like the very devil itself! Do not let “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” prejudice your thoughts and actions. Furthermore, teach your children that presents are not the product of morally good behavior, but rather a function of buying power.

And of course by that I refer to parents trying to buy their children’s love, but that’s a column for another day.